Monday, November 16, 2015

BOOK REVIEW: THE ICE CREAM BLONDE...

ANOTHER
BLONDE,ANOTHER FINE MESS

Why don’t we know more about
Thelma Todd?

by Don Stradley

Thelma
Todd was here and gone – an almost archetypical female image of the late twenties
and early thirties, holding the screen
with the Marx Brothers and Laurel and Hardy – without a trace. Her name, of course, rings a gentle bell with
me, probably because Kenneth Anger gave her baffling death a few paragraphs in
his morbid Hollywood Babylon. It’s
not poor Thelma’s fault that she blends in so easily with the other pretty
blondes of the era, all of those good time girls who died mysteriously. As Michelle Morgan reports in The
Ice Cream Blonde, Todd had enough sass and charm to light up a small
building. Unfortunately, Todd did her thing many years before the baby boomers were
around to immortalize her to James
Dean-type proportions, so she doesn’t get the teary tributes on TCM from Carol
Burnett or Amy Poehler. Still, by writing a book with care and love, Morgan makes
us feel that by missing out on Thelma Todd, we’ve missed out on something big.

Morgan begins
in December 1935 with Todd’s body being discovered in her 1932 Lincoln phaeton,
dead from carbon monoxide poisoning at age 29. Suicide? Accidental death? Foul
play? We’ll never know. Then we’re whisked back to Todd’s early days in Lawrence,
Massachusetts where she’d been a beauty contest winner and an aspiring school
teacher. A naturally vivacious young woman with saucer eyes and a face that promised
mischief, Todd earned a spot at the newly formed Paramount School in New York, a
place where “talented young people could be nurtured and grow into mainstream
actors.” In a stunt that reeks of American
Idol, the whole class was featured in a readymade hunk of studio fluff
called Fascinating Youth, and then dispersed
across the country to promote the thing. Todd was the obvious standout, but her
story is not of a star struck kid who clawed her way onto Groucho’s lap. She
was a hard worker, and serious about acting. One of her contemporaries described
her as “the smartest dumb blond I ever knew.” Todd was good enough for comedy magnate
Hal Roach to create a female version of Stan and Ollie by pairing Thelma first
with Zasu Pitts, and then Patsy Kelly; his experiments didn’t quite match what
he’d done with the boys, but he may have created the template for Laverne & Shirley.

The work
came in buckets: Vamping Venus, Dollar
Dizzy, Looser Than Loose, The Pip From Pittsburgh. Todd was usually billed
second or third, and was typically saucy; she didn’t steal scenes so much as
pick their pockets for fun. One reviewer called her “half vampire and half
clown.” She made the transition from silent to talkies with hardly a ruffle,
and by the time of her death she’d appeared in nearly 120 movies. The beginning of the end may have been when Todd fell for
Roland West, a middling film director who was described by some as “sinister.” Years
after their fling he asked her to help him run a chic sidewalk café in Santa
Monica. She was getting too old to play the gum chewing babe who kept a pet
seal in her hotel room, so the café seemed a
good way to branch out. “I can’t quite get Hollywood,” Todd once said, pointing
to her New England upbringing as the reason for her discomfort. “People here
have no sense of values.”

Morgan
has authored books on Marilyn Monroe and Madonna. Though she has a penchant for
showbiz scandals, she avoids gaudiness and writes in a careful style that is eminently readable.
While gangsters have always been part of the Todd mystery – she was briefly
married to a wannabe mobster, and she allegedly faced down a bunch of Nevada
mugs who’d wanted to enhance the café with a casino – Morgan actually digs up
some new names and theories to ponder. Morgan’s specialty is raising red flags,
especially around the odd behavior of West and his wife, Jewel Carmen, a shady
pair who kept tripping over their stories in the days after Todd’s death. Morgan’s
real achievement, though, is that she has kicked Todd back to life, and I’ll
never again dismiss her as just another post-flapper tootsie whose gaiety hid a
dark side. Fame was still a new concept in those days, so people in the movie
industry were often waylaid by it. Some of Thelma’s peers killed themselves by jumping
from the Hollywoodland sign; others ate rat poison, or died at the business end
of a coke bottle at Fatty Arbuckle’s house. They shot themselves, they shot each
other, they shot their lovers. Todd, with her intelligence and practicality,
should’ve sidestepped all of that mess. In fact, she seems like a very modern
woman, and would fit in with today’s female stars, especially with her various stalkers,
weight struggles, and bad taste in men.

About Me

I write for various magazines, including the great CINEMA RETRO, and the Film Noir Foundation's official magazine, Noir City. Check them out if you love movies.

I currently serve as the editorial consultant for thefilmdetective.tv, a movie streaming service that does everything from restoring old films to selling a vast collection of DVDs. Download our classic movie app!

Along with movie and arts coverage, I've written about boxing for The Ring, and ESPN.com; I've written true crime stories for the short-lived HUB; and I occasionally publish historical tales in Wild West magazine. I've also written for a bunch of newspapers in the Boston area.

THIS DAZZLING TIME is where you'll find a bit of everything. I appreciate having your attention for a moment or two.